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Public Journalism’s Past and Future

Public journalism, via Voakes, means five things: Listening to the citizens while still maintaining the freedom to choose what stories journalists cover; look at all the angles that can frame a story; frame stories in a way that facilitates public understanding and knowledge of the issues; when writing about public problems, alert citizens to take note of possible solutions; and finally, journalists have to realize how they are communicating with the public on these issues. Walter Lippman has been known as a champion of public journalism in the 1920s. Nichols’ article explains that public journalism “has set out to help members of hte public come to see themselves as citizens, and hold them accountable for grappling with the full complexity of issues and become participants in civil society rather than mere spectators of it.” (78)

This idea of public journalism started as an experiment, and came from the idea that citizens should be more civically engaged. Voting was not enough, according to the pioneers of this movement. At this time people felt like there wasn’t really anything they could do, so public journalism was born.

Criticism has arisen, saying that the public would be bored by public journalism, and that it means that the media distrusts the government too much. A main objection is that this is the exact opposite of objective journalism that just states the facts and does not speculate about normative values.

The Friendland article talks about the changes public journalism may face in the future. Friendland’s work in Wichita, Norfolk and Charlotte drew him to the conclusion that public journalism actually does “extend civic action beyond the scope of specific projects.” (37) Friendland maintains a cautiously optimistic lookout for public journalism, stating that he has noticed “signs of continued institutional validity and support.” (38)

As a high school journalism student, I went to a summer institute to learn more about the profession. There our instructors encouraged us to practice this notion of public journalism. When I returned to my high school as editor of the school paper, I tried to instill this sensibility into our staff. My fellow students and I wrote political articles and tried to get our friends involved in these sorts of things. I’m not sure how well it worked, but we tried it anyway. It’s a difficult thing to get a high schooler involved who doesn’t care at all about politics.

A poll story run by The Atlantic brings to mind the importance of the internet on public journalism. While the poll story reports that media insiders think that the internet is detrimental to journalism, I could see how public journalism could be helped by it. A public that is able to instantly interact with these stories would be able to be more involved in civic engagement because they are already starting to get engaged by writing about something they’ve seen from a news organization via the internet. In this story, 65% of the 43 respondents (this poll probably didn’t have a large population to draw from in the first place) said that journalism was being “hurt more” by the internet, while 35% said it was being “helped more.”